Some point in the past, a character has had something terrible happen to him, usually the loss of a family member or other loved one and has sworn vengeance on the one who did it. However, getting Revenge at the time may not have been easy, often as they were too young, or weren't sure who the perpetrator was. But they still knew that the murderer has it coming, and know that someday they'll meet them and that drive for vengeance runs through their life.

Examples

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Anime & Manga

Inverted in Black Cat. Train spends the entire series racing after his stalker/ex-partner Creed who wants to rule the world alongside him, because Creed murdered his only friend, tried to kill his new partner, and is trying to become ruler of the world. This is seemingly at odds with Train's unspoken vow not to kill. However in the last couple chapters, Train reveals that he doesn't want to kill Creed, he wants Creed to redeem himself — and that's what he did all this work for.

Clare from Claymore becomes one of the eponymous warriors and trains for years specifically to take down Priscilla, after Priscilla kills Clare's mother figure, Teresa. It takes her over a decade to finally track Priscilla down. Priscilla has no idea who Clare is and finds her more annoying than anything else. Nevertheless, Clare remembers, and she's been waiting for this moment. And then subverted horribly when Clare loses the fight. Priscilla is the strongest character in the story by far, and Clare can't even scratch her.

In Naruto, Sasuke Uchiha wants to kill his brother Itachi Uchiha for killing the rest of the Uchiha clan, especially their parents. Once he is told by Madara that Danzo was the one that convinced him to do it he decides he wants to destroy the whole damn Leaf Village (even though they purportedly killed the clan because they were about to start a civil war).

Afro Samurai has spent his life since childhood getting revenge on the man that killed his father for the number one headband.

The villain even lampshades this trope.

Justice (To Young Afro): It's unfortunate you had to see this, boy. This moment'll always haunt you. You will be consumed by hatred for me. Challenge me, when you're ready to duel a god!

Transformers Armada's Wheeljack ends up accidentally abandoned while trapped in the middle of a fire. He survives, and eventually tracks down the one he believes responsible, and traps himself, the other guy, and a mostly innocent bystander in a burning factory. All three survive.

After the events of the Eclipse which led to the fall of the Band of the Hawk, Guts from Berserk spends several years Walking the Earth, hunting down and killing the demonic Apostles of the Godhand as the Black Swordsman. He's hoping to become powerful enough to take on his former friend Griffith, who has become one of the Godhands themselves and was responsible for betraying his True Companions and driving his Love Interest insane.

Much of the plot of Code Geass revolves around the protagonist seeking revenge on his dear old daddy the Emperor for refusing to save his mother's life and his sister from being crippled by an attack inside the castle, displaying apathy when he requests that vengeance be exacted (worse still: punishing him and his sister for being "weak"), abandoning him and his crippled sister in Japan, and then invading said country and leaving them for dead.

Get Backers drops a few hints towards Kazuki being like this, but he doesn't come into the full trope until he actually thinks that he's getting close to the enemy that murdered his family. Since it doesn't end before they kidnap his gang, who were with him mostly to facilitate his revenge, it gets pretty messy.

Suitengu of Speed Grapher is practically a patron saint of this trope. When he was 13, his parents fell into massive debt to the wrong people and killed themselves, leaving him and his little sister at the hands of their amoral debt collectors. They were both sold off, he to a military organization and she into prostitution. Once he is free and finds his sister worse than dead, he begins his decade long revenge plan. He builds himself up to the right hand of the most powerful CEOs in Japan, then kills her and takes over her company, becoming worth over 3 trillion dollars. When the time comes, he eliminates all of his targets in one swift stroke, personally murdering the man who kidnapped and sold him and his sister, then destroys the entire fortune of the corporation, shattering Japan's economy and severely injuring other world powers who had much invested in it. So, at least two decades after he was wronged, he successfully executes a plan that not only kills the men responsible for destroying his family, but the entire corrupt society that allowed such practices to become commonplace.

Gin from Bleach waited one century to finally get his revenge on Aizen for attacking Rangiku when she and Gin were still living in Rukongai.

The few survivors of the Quincy massacre, now known as the Vandenreich have been preparing new technologies and techniques for over a millenium to get back at Soul Society.

Barnaby from Tiger & Bunny becomes a superhero with a very public identity in order to provoke the man that killed his parents out of whatever hole he's been hiding in for the last twenty years. This would have been a better idea if it wasn't the killer himself who suggested it.

In Basilisk, Tenzen has a grudge against both the Koga and Iga clans, as his mother was a member of the Iga who was killed by a member of the Koga (Tenzen's father). Tenzen was raised among the Koga but defected the Iga as an adult, and plotted for a long time (being immortal, while he looks about 40, he's actually over 200) to fan the flames of hatred between the clans in order to cause the deaths of everyone else in both groups. He succeeds.

Char Aznable is well known for holding onto grudges. He spent years serving in the Zeon military, and all that time he was simply waiting for the opportunity to take vengeance against the Zabis for his father's death at their hands.

Comic Books

Batman, who took up a life of crime fighting after seeing his family killed before his eyes, is a great example of how it motivates someone.

Taken to a whole other level in Superman & Batman: Generations: The Ultra-Humanite is nearly killed in 1939 by Superman. His body ruined, he has his brain transferred into his minion Lex Luthor's body. He then spends the next fifty years getting his revenge, first by turning Superman's son against him, then murdering his family, then just to twist the knife further he has Superman's friends like Jimmy Olsen and Perry White Jr. killed while Supes is too consumed with rage to do anything but chase "Luthor". And then it turns out this was all part of a Gambit Roulette to steal Superman's body.

Eastern Animation

In Firing Range, the inventor dedicated himself to the tank, in order to get revenge on the generals who got his son killed.

In Death Rides a Horse (AKAAs Man to Man or Da uomo a uomo), a 1967 "Spaghetti Western", Ryan says to Bill, "Somebody once wrote that revenge is a dish that has to be eaten cold. As hot as you are, you're liable to end with indigestion."

Perhaps the poster boy would be Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, a man who spent twenty years doing nothing but practice fencing to avenge his father, armed with nothing more than the sword that his father made and the knowledge of the killer having six fingers on one hand.

Happens twice in Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns. In For a Few Dollars More, Col. Mortimer has spent years honing his skills as a bounty hunter, tracking down the bandit who raped his sister and murdered her lover in front of her, which led to her suicide. Likewise, Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West has spent most of his life hunting down Frank, who murdered his brother when they were teenagers. By putting a noose round the brother's neck, and forcing him to stand on Harmonica's shoulders until his legs gave way, no less.

Played for laughs in The Good The Bad And The Ugly, where a one-armed man trains himself for months to shoot left-handed and get revenge against Tuco, the titular "ugly", who caused his mutilation. When he finally tracks him down, he goes on to give him the obligatory monologue, until an unimpressed Tuco kills him with his concealed pistol, annoyingly quipping "When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk".

Leonard Shelby, of Memento, is so traumatized by his wife's rape and murder that he literally cannot remember anything else. Not even that she survived. Or that he already killed the guy who did it. Maybe.

The western The Quick and the Dead has the heroine tracking down the man, and his gang, that made her kill her sheriff father.

Conan the Barbarian (1982) had Conan searching for Thulsa Doom, who killed his family and put him in slavery (and turned innocent young Conan into Arnold Schwarzenegger).

In Sleepy Hollow the wife of Baltus Van Tassel had actually been planning revenge on his family for years for stealing her family's home. Thus gains control of the horseman to fulfill this plan.

In The Fall, all five of the men in Roy's story have a reason to be going after Odious, ranging from revenge for a loved one's death to being banished from their homeland.

In Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini sleeps with his old rival's fiancee on the day before their wedding. As Louis remarks:

"I couldn't help feeling that even Sibella's capacity for lying was going to be taxed to the utmost. Time had brought me revenge on Lionel, and as the Italian proverb says, revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold."

In The Godfather Part 2, young Vito Andolini's father was murdered by Don Ciccio, Mafia Don of Corleone, Sicily. Shortly after, Vito's brother is killed while out for revenge, and Vito's mother is killed when she goes to Ciccio to beg for Vito's life. Vito manages to escape to America and takes the name Vito Corleone, making his fortune as a gangster. He returns to Sicily some 20 years later and finally takes his revenge on the elderly Ciccio by stabbing him to death on his own front porch.

You see, it's the slow knife, the knife that takes its time, the knife that waits years without forgetting, then slips quietly between the bones. That's the knife that cuts deepest.

In Clear and Present Danger, a Columbian drug lord kills the American who stole from him, also his wife and kids. When his security chief tells him that he shouldn't have killed the kids because of the bad press, the drug lord tells him he wasn't going to wait around for them to grow up and come after him. No one explained to him that, outside of movies, Americans generally don't do that. At least not on a personal level.

Count: "And now, farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude. I have substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked."

In David Eddings's The Belgariad, The Hero Garion swears vengeance against the Grolim sorcerer Asharak after finding out that he was responsible for burning his parents alive in an attempt to kill Garion as an infant. He eventually lights Asharak on fire in an early example of his magical ability.

Belgarath buries Zedar alive in repayment for four thousand year's worth of atrocities and crimes.

In George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, Doran Martell has been patiently waiting and plotting his revenge on House Lannister for their brutal murders of his sister Elia and her two young children. He intends to restore the Targaryens to power, utterly destroying the Lannisters in the process and taking away everything they gained from Elia's murder.

Lord Manderly doesn't exactly serve his revenge cold: He serves it hot, well-seasoned, enclosed within a flaky crust and with an excellent gravy, all at a wedding feast... to their next of kin.Om nom nom.

Then there's Arya Stark, who after seeing her father betrayed and executed starts an ever-growing list of people she plans to get revenge on, which she repeats before going to sleep each night.

Petyr Baelish was told where to go by the universe at large when it came to trying to court Catelyn Tully's hand. Um... whoops? Most of the plot is him basically cutting everything and anything down by the hamstrings by slow increments to pay the world back by eventually slitting its throat...

Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold is (obviously) centered around this. The protagonist is betrayed and left for dead, and spends several months in recovery and the rest of the book methodically seeking out the seven men who did it and taking revenge.

In the Dale Brown novel Act of War, Renegade Russian Colonel Yegor Zakharov seeks the destruction of Harold Kingman and his oil company for taking over Zakharov's old oil firm. National Security Adviser Robert Chamberlain, a former employee of Kingman's, also wants in, and naturally the two are in cahoots.

In the Andrew Vachss Burke book Dead and Gone, it eventually turns out that the villain who ordered the plot-critical hit was an old enemy of Burke's who wants him dead for what had been done to him in the past.

The core of the plot in Henning Mankell's novel The Man from Beijin is a murderous revenge exacted for wrongs inflicted on the Big Bad's grandfather.

This is a major plot point and point of worry for Bean and co. regarding the villain Achilles. Because he always seeks revenge on those who see him helpless and because he can wait indefinitely, use whatever methods, and always makes sure it's done where nobody can trace him, the heroes have to be very careful to never let themselves alone where he can get them. Bean and Suriyawong learn how to exploit this.

The In Death series: Vengeance in Death reveals that it took time for Roarke to gather the money, resources, and power needed to take on Marlena's murderers. When he did, he was careful to take them out one at a time, kept the kills at two a year, and cover his tracks. The killer of the story spent years preparing to take on Roarke and his associates. Cold.

In Shadows of the Empire, this trope is the reason why Xizor waits so long to get vengeance on Darth Vader after a bio-experiment the latter was in charge of led to the destruction of the former's family. 'It was never a question of if, but rather a question of when. Xizor gets his chance when he learns of Luke Skywalker's connection to Vader, and decides some karma is required.

Gaius Sextus waits twenty-five years to avenge the death of his son, killing one of the High Lords responsible via volcano and getting another eaten by Vord.

Learning from the above, the Vord Queen refuses to kill the mother of Gaius' grandchild in a gambit to draw him to her in vengeance. Live bait is a better choice in this situation.

Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: This trope drives the first 7 books of the series, with some of the characters wanting Revenge for wrongs that go back at least 20 years ago! Unfortunately, you might find it difficult to sympathize with the main characters after awhile.

In the Iron Druid Chronicles the Norse God Thor has spent most of his immortal existence acting like a Jerk Jock and pissing off anyone he could. Some of those he offended were immortals themselves and they spent a long time finding a way to get back at him. Gunnar is a werewolf who waited over 300 years to get his revenge. Leif became a vampire specifically so he would have the time needed to get his revenge. It took him over 1000 years to put together a group of immortals that would have a chance to kill Thor. Väinämöinen (demi-god) and Perun (pagan god) have waited even longer.

In Dragonriders of Pern, a ten-year-old Lessa waits for another decade to bring vengeance upon the man who slaughtered her family. In that time, she hones her Psychic Powers and uses her power of suggestion to bring Ruatha Hold from a prosperous land to a ruin and engineer the murder of Fax via F'lar

The Barry B. Longyear novel City of Baraboo includes an alien race whose culture reveres elaborate revenge scenarios. The central characters, an interstellar circus, fall victim to one such scenario perpetrated by their human enemy. They defeat the scenario by putting on a show, proving that the scenario is not causing them the suffering that it demands to be accepted and successful.

In A Brother's Price, the villains turn out to have spent years on their scheme to wipe out the current royal family and take the throne themselves, as revenge for losses suffered in a civil war between portions of said royal family. They go so far as to sacrifice members of their own family by marrying their brother to the princesses to get an inside track on things like the palace layout, as well as gaining a trusted position and a claim as legal heirs, and blowing up family members they don't consider trustworthy in the course of an attempt to wipe out as many of the royals as they can.

In Cornell Woolrich's novel "The Bride Wore Black", a woman spends years tracking down and methodically murdering the men who drunkenly ran over her groom right after the wedding. Only too late she found out they didn't do it and her husband was shot down as the car sped by, missing him. She also finds she had the real killer at the point of a gun but let him go - not knowing what he had done

Gus in Breaking Bad build up his own sizable drug empire over 20 years, with taking revenge for the death of his best friend as one of is his prime motivations. By that time the man who fired the shot is almost entirely paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair, and unable to speak. As Gus arranges for his nephews and the leaders of his old cartel to be killed off one by one, he visits the old man in his nursing home, telling him the news of the latest deaths himself.

Principal Wood in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fought vampires in the hope of finding the one who'd killed his mother. Turns out it was Spike, pre-Heel Face Turn.

Daniel Holt in Angel. Angelus killed his family, so Holt has himself frozen, sends himself magically forward in time to present day, kidnaps Angel's infant son and raises him in a hell universe for sixteen years before sending the boy back to our dimension to kill his father. That's dedication.

An episode of Cold Case dealt with a man whose son was molested and murdered in 1987. The father was pegged as the killer and spent 20 years in prison before being exonerated, and when he gets out, he starts killing one registered sex offender or pedophile a day, vowing not to stop until the real killer of his son is arrested. At the end, he corners the murderer, planning to kill him before committing suicide, but is convinced not to by his ex-wife, who still loves him.

Upon finding out who the main suspect was in his wife's hit-and-run death, Detective Jeffries goes after him with a gun but does not kill him.

An episode of CSI had a particularly epic example of this. While at a sports game, a morbidly obese woman was in the winning seat, and got called down. A Jerk Ass in the audience started jeering her, and got everyone else going (a regular occurance, as his other "victims" stated). She was utterly humiliated, her fiance left her and things actually got worse from there. Obssessed, she dieted, worked out, etc. excessively, eventually becoming stunningly hot, succeeded in joining a sports team's cheerleaders, rigged the winning ticket contest so that the loudmouth jerkass won, and kissed him when he came down, killing him via poison she had put on fake lips.

The overarching plot of Monk is that Adrian Monk is trying to figure out who killed his wife and bring him to justice. He finally succeeds in the series finale, though the killer cheated justice by killing himself when his crimes were proven.

The brothers in Supernatural are out to avenge their mother, a task they succeeded in. Inadvertently starting a chain of events leading directly to the end of the world. Nice job breaking it, woobies.

In True Blood, Eric proves to love icy revenges. Russell killed his whole family when he still was a human viking, and he waited more than 1000 years to kill his husband while fucking him.

An earlier episode of Castle had the murder victim's husband, the main suspect, end up dead a year after she went missing. It turns out, the victim was killed by her husband and her father murdered the husband after investigating the crime himself and finding out he was the one who did it.

Rare villainous example: Dubenich from Leverage achieves this in "The Radio Job" with the help of Latimer. The next episode is Nate and the team getting back at them both.

Slade Wilson is a villainous example in Arrow. After he decides to take revenge on Oliver, for a mix of reasons that are both justified and downright ridiculous, he vows that it will not be as quick and painless as killing him- Oliver must suffer first. To that end, he manipulates Oliver into giving up his position at Queen Consolidated through his right-hand woman Isabel Rochev, drives away Thea, murders Moira and then sends a group of thugs with Super Strength to tear Starling City apart.

In the climax of the third episode of The Escape Artist, Will murders Foyle by making him die painfully from a minor stab wound... which gets infected by a kind of seafood that Foyle is allergic to, as revenge for Foyle murdering his wife.

Music

The song "Bad Blood" by the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band tells of a one-eyed man who trains for three years, then wanders four more to get revenge against the man who left him like that. When someone else beats him to it, he's rather miffed:

"Hey you, mutton-head, I've been lookin' for that particular son-of-a-bitch for nearly seven years, man! You've just spoiled everything! I could have been a doctor or an architect!"

...You really don't know how long I've waited for your destruction / I'm telling you, you just can't get away / A whole lifetime planning out your destruction, with no other function / You really don't know...

"A Boy Named Sue", written by Shel Silverstein and performed by Johnny Cash, tells of a man who's hunting the man who named him Sue — who it turns out gave him the name so he'd grow up tough. It works.

"The Mariner's Revenge Song" by the Decemberists is a sea shanty ballad about a man who spent his whole life searching for the seaman who caused his mother's death when he was a child.

We are two mariners, our ship's sole survivors, in this belly of a whale / its ribs are ceiling beams, its guts are carpeting, I guess we have some time to kill / you may not remember me, I was a child of three, and you a lad of eighteen / but I remember you, and I will relate to you, how our histories interweave...

'In the Air Tonight' by Phil Collins. 'I can feel it coming in the air tonight, O Lord/ I've been waiting for this moment for all of my life, O Lord ... '

In the title routine on his album Revenge, Bill Cosby recalls an incident where, as a kid, he got back at nemesis Junior Barnes, who hit him in the face with a slushball. Cosby built the perfect snowball and stored it in the freezer, and waited. Until July 12th, his birthday. By the time that day rolled around, his mother had found the snowball and thrown it away, and Cosby had to take his revenge by spitting on him.

Religion and Mythology

In The Bible, David's oldest son, Amnon, rapes his half-sister Tamar. Tamar's other brother, Absalom, finds out immediately, but waits two years for the opportunity to kill Amnon.

Benjamin Barker was exiled for years by Judge Turpin in order to steal his wife. The play begins with his return to London as Sweeney Todd, ready to exact his revenge.

Videogames

In Final Fantasy XII, Montblanc had formed Clan Centurio to seek revenge on Yiazmat, who killed his master. Later the hero (Vaan) will accept a mission from him in order to slay it.

In F.E.A.R., Alma waited several decades after she died for the revenge she sought against Armacham.

In Yggdra Union, antagonists Luciana and Aegina have been waiting to get revenge on Yggdra for seventeen years as they were exiled and supposed to be killed while Yggdra, their younger sister, was pampered and groomed to receive Fantasinia's crown. The valkyrie twins believe Yggdra's ignorance to be almost as bad as Ordene's crimes. Then we have Nessiah, who's been waiting to get revenge on Asgard for the way they treated him for a thousand years. Served cold, indeed...

In Assassins Creed II, it takes Ezio twenty years to get to the man who ordered the deaths of his father and brothers. although the man who directly kills them dies much much earlier. And even then he doesn't outright kill him, the evil pope. He just kicks his ass and punches him brutally. that's right: Ezio kicks the ass of the then current POPE. It takes another game for the pope to finally die, and not even at the hands of Ezio, but by his own poisoned apple.

The protagonist in Sid Meiers Pirates embarks on a pirating career of 20 years or more to get revenge on the Marquis de Montalban for imprisoning his family. Eventually, however, the Marquis admits he's beaten and agrees to serve as your personal valet.

In the backstory of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, this is implied to be the true reason why the Empire signed the White-Gold Concordat with the Thalmor. Both sides were severely weakened after the Great War and simply agreed to a truce for the sake of biding their time for an inevitable second war.

Visual Novels

Ace Attorney: While Manfred von Karma's revenge on Gregory Edgeworth was served hot, he attempted revenge on Gregory's son Miles just as the statute of limitations on Gregory's murder was running out. He prosecuted Miles for the murder of the defense lawyer on Gregory's case, and then for the murder of his own father. What makes this more painful is von Karma was the one to adopt Miles and teach him how to be an effective prosecutor. Luckily for Miles, his defense attorney, Phoenix Wright, was a Spanner in the Works.

A recurring theme in G-Senjou no Maou. Several of the characters have been affected in their childhood, and their primary motivation is getting revenge for the things that happened to them. The most obvious one would be the protagonist towards Azai Gonzou.

In the Voltage IncRomance GameKiss Of Revenge, the protagonist's mother died in the hospital due to an error which was then covered up. The protagonist spent the next twelve years working to become a doctor so that she could take a position at the same hospital and get revenge on the hospital director, who was responsible for the cover-up.

In Cwen's Quest the titular character is seeking revenge on her father for trying to kill her when she was a child. In fact you could say she is fairly obsessed as she has thus far expressed little interested in other activities like helping others or amassing wealth in favor of her singular goal of revenge.

Taken to new extremes with the Big Bad of 8-Bit Theater, Sarda, who waits for billions of years to get revenge on the main characters after they scarred him for life, murdered his family, murdered multiple sets of foster parents, and destroyed the orphanage that he lived in in addition to all of the other atrocities that they committed.

In Darths & Droids, Jango Fett spends ten years building an army and plotting the destruction of the Jedi Order and the downfall of the entire Republic, just to get revenge against Obi-Wan for killing his "business" partner.

In El Goonish Shive, the shadowed character known only as "The Child Left Behind" trained for years for the chance to avenge someone he knew who was killed by Damien only for Grace to do the job for him. He now seeks Grace to properly thank her.

In an EverQuest fan comic, a high-level female Barbarian warrior approaches Cros Treewind (an NPC who kills players he sees fighting animals) from behind and yells "Cros Treewind, your ass is mine!", while he stands frozen with an Oh, Crap expression on his face. The caption says revenge is best served many levels later.

Macbeth in Gargoyles puts a twist on this one: "Revenge is a dish best eaten cold. And I have waited nine hundred years for this meal." However, Goliath points out to him and his nemesis Demona that every time either of them has attempted to get revenge, it only made their lives worse. As such, it goes beyond a subversion into an outright denunciation of the very idea of revenge. "What profit vengeance?" has been described by producer Greg Weisman as one of his favorite themes.

Indeed, the hallmark concludes with Xanatos reminding Fox that he believes "Revenge is a sucker's bet."

On Invader Zim, Tak wants to conquer Earth before Zim, since Zim was the one who made her fail her military exam and sent her to work as a janitor (on Planet Dirt) for fifty years. She actually doesn't view it as revenge so much as setting things right, though—-as she (correctly) points out, she's a highly competant invader who deserved to get assigned a planet, while Zim was sent there just to get him out of the Almighty Tallests antennae.

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